With the Antigravity Gear Kitchen coming in a Sil-Nylon bag (not pictured) the stove itself sat on top of the plastic screw lid container which just so happened to get squashed when I got aggressive with loading my pack. I eventually ditched the fuel bottle and placed the stove inside the plastic container to help protect it. The cap to the fuel bottle was just too difficult to remove to refill the bottle with alcohol.

I didn't have much luck with boiling water on the stove and then pouring it on to a dehydrated meal in the screw lid container and letting it stand. They never seemed to cook well enough. So eventually I was back to cooking the meals in with the water and boiling them. Eating the meals straight from the pot.

I stopped cooking hot meals after Kent, Connecticut. This is mainly because obtaining fuel was going to get harder the further north I was going. It also allowed me to carry more food, though I was eating tortilla wraps which did get boring.

Less concerned about weight on the Great Divide, I am taking a MSR Superfly gas stove, along with a GSI Double Boiler (two stackable pots).

If I was to do it all over again?

If I was doing the thru-hike again I would want to take two pots rather than the plastic container that comes with the Kitchen. Eating from the tall container was more difficult than eating from the pot.

This made it all the way to Mt Kathdin. It did leak with a couple of holes in the bag, which I could never mend. In Damascus, I took the cap that was fitting the water bag and hydration hose and placed that on the end of the filter’s hose. I would let the water collect in the water bag and then transfer it to my water bottle (see Pack review for reasons for switching to the water bottle).

Sometimes it was difficult to collect the water with shallow water sources, which required scooping the water up with the water bottle before transferring it into the filter bag. That increased the potential of drinking the ‘bad’ water I was trying to avoid.

There were a number of times that the filter inside the bag came off the bottom hose and it usually required dumping out the water and reconnecting before refilling the bag.

Hanging the bag was challenging, sometimes I got lucky and found a notch on a tree nearby the stream but often I found I was walking back to the shelter before filtering it.

I kept the filter in the side pocket and let it dry out as I hiked. I’m carrying a hand pump filter on the Great Divide as I don’t want to need somewhere to have to hang it.

I found this bag was too small for all the food I wanted to hang, also the Aloksak only lasted 3 weeks before the seal ripped apart. After Kent, Connecticut I was using my largest stuff sack as my food bag. If only the outer bag was a little bigger it could also double as a mosquito head net. (refer to the Pennsylvania photo album when I put the thing jokingly on my head). I am using a dry bag for the Greate Divide that is over twice the capacity.